ATI TV-Wonder PCI and WinXP

[digital-mann]

I'm sure this has been beaten to death just based on what I have see in the Capture card area however I need to know a couple of things and hopefully someone has been down this road.

My TV Wonder in limited to 320x240 res. in Windows XP. I had it at 640x480 in Windows 98....anyway. I tried to load the lastest version of MediaCentre and the Confuguration check shows that my Capture Drivers are not loaded correctly. I have loaded and reloaded a thousand times the lastest and the oldest WDM drivers from ATI's web site. In Device manager everything seems ok but in the event log I receive the message listed below for all the ATI TV devices. I can watch tv and I can capture with the low res sometimes, if the audio does quite on me.

The questions are, what are these messages and can I get rid of them. Is there a way to increase the Capture min res? I read that there was a reg entry that could help with driver installation.

Any assitance with the ATI TV-Wonder PCI would be apprciated. Thanks

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Service Control Manager
Event Category: None
Event ID: 7000
Date: 20/08/2003
Time: 7:22:42 AM
User: N/A
Computer: PDHOME
Description:
The ATI WDM Teletext Decoder service failed to start due to the following
error:
The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it
has no enabled devices associated with it.

[macleod]

Your cap card can cap over 240 lines in XP. My set up is I purchased powervcrII and purchased IUVCR. By performing the "tweek", I can cap at various resolutions in powervcrII and am able to cap at 352x480,720x480 with IUVCR.

You will probably get about a million posts here telling you to toss out those ATI drivers as they are piece of junk (ok a million and 1 with my post ). I have heard people use BXWINCAP drivers (its something like that-so a search on this site for ati drivers and one of the posts will tell you were to get the drivers).

[digital-mann]

Are you saying I just need to use different capture software? I am Using InterVideo WinCoder which allows me to capture at 720x480 but I just get the feeling it is just streching the 240lines of video.

What do you make of Event Errors?

[macleod]

personally, I would say yes. The ATI software, in my opinion, sucks doughnuts . Others will say that it is the greatest thing and then others will say its great if you use MMC 7.X. I would recommend that you use different drivers or different software.

I dont think that it just doubles each of the 240 lines.

Cant help you on the event error. Never dealt with that before.

[jtommyj]

VirtualVCr allows me to capture at 720x480 and it's free. Can be found on hte tools. I really like the setup. I do have the TV Wonder VE PCI.

[BowlPacker]

Basically just to reiterate what others have said, I have not had good luck with the ATI MMC drivers/software. I have achieved excellent results using the btwincap drivers and virtualvcr. Powervcr works well, too (with a registry tweak), but I prefer (for quality) to capture as MJPEG and then encode to MPEG instead of the real-time MPEG encoding that powervcr does.

I have not given the latest release of ATI MMC a try yet, though.